IRELAND GENEALOGICAL PROJECT ~ COUNTY WICKLOW PAGE Find your ancestors in County Wicklow Ireland. Search free databases such as Census Records, wills, Grave Yards, church records, family bibles, Maps and tombstone inscriptions. Find links to other great Wicklow records like cemeteries, vital stats, and obituaries. Read great Tutorials and Articles on Irish Genealogy. Learn where to find Wicklow records off the net.

Ancestors at Rest Death records of all kinds - funeral cards, death notices, cemetery receipts, obits...and moreFamily Bibles Family Bible entries and pictures of the births, marriages and death pages Olive Tree Genealogy Updates on new genealogy Records onlineThe Paper Trail Eclectic mix of old documents - you may just find an ancestor's will, land record or general store receipt here!Past Voices Letters from 1800s - from Civil War soldiers, from wives to husbands, sons to mothers, sisters to sisters.

People from County Wicklow Ireland in the U.S.A.

Between 1841 and 1851, Ireland lost 2 million of it people. An estimated one million of these people left the country while the other million died. Of the one million Irish inhabitants who emigrated during this decade, most went to Canada, England and the United States.

It's a common misconception that the mass exodus that took place in Ireland during the first half of the l9th century was the result of the potato blight of 1845, but the famine was actually the last in a series of misfortunes that Ireland had to endure.
Before the Great Famine, the Irish were already feeling the pressure of rising rents and a slow job market. There was little manufacturing in Ireland and what their was was concentrated in Dublin and Belfast. The agricultural industry was growing but modern machinery was starting to reduce the amount of manual labor needed.
Until the 17th century the Irish had lived under the rule of a small minority of wealthy landowners. When Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland in the mid-17th century, those landowners who would not give up Catholicism saw their property confiscated and then given to the English. By 1661 about 40% of Ireland was owned by England. Many Irish peasants-stayed on as tenant farmers, working the land and paying rent on the small plots of land where they lived and grew their own food. But as the growing of crops became less profitable, many landowners began to graze sheep and cattle for the English market, taking back the land from the Irish poor. This led to a series of evictions where tenant farmers were forced off the land that had sustained them. The lucky tenant farmers who weren't evicted found there was less land available to them, and these shrinking plots were being shared by more and more occupants. This diminishing land contributed much to Ireland's eventual reliance on the potato during the late 18th century. The amount of land needed to grow potatoes could feed more people than the same amount of land used to grow something else. By 1845 when the blight hit approximately 3 million Irish consumed almost nothing but potatoes.

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What will you find on the Ireland Genealogy Project Wicklow Page....
Wicklow Cemetery Records, Helpful Articles, Free Genealogy Stuff, Order Death Records Online, VitalChek Express Service order Birth and Death Records online, and Links to Great Genealogy Sites Like The USGenWeb Tombstone Transcription Project, Cemetery Database on Rootsweb,and so much more.